The Nineteenth Century City

 

Using a Photograph to Ponder Race and the Urban Space

Coming Fall 2014

Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, 19th century woman

Though I have not graded the first paper for this course, I am already prepping for next semester. In addition to teaching "U.S. to 1865" (HY 103), I will teach "The Nineteenth Century City" (HY 300) again. Students in this course will spend more time looking at urban life in America during the nineteenth century. The growth of cities begins in earnest in the early nineteenth century. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than the countryside.

While making fliers for this course, I wanted to find one that has resonances with one of the course readings, a memoir by Eliza Potter, a hairdresser of mixed race. A native of New York, Potter traveled to Europe, working as a nursemaid and later as a hairdresser for wealthy people on both sides of the Atlantic. All this as she eventually  owned a home with her "own fig tree," as she put it, in Cincinnati. Potter's account is helpful to my effort to show students how race, gender and class can nuance what can be learned in any exploration of city life, something I hope students enrolled this spring in Black Urban Culture understand as they prepare for their final exam.

One of the fliers I made advertising "The Nineteenth Century City" features  Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, a woman of West African royal ancestry who was reportedly orphaned in 1848 when her parents were killed in a massacre. I was struck by Davies' elegant hairdo in this photograph. Two years later, the king of Dahomey presented her as a "gift" to Queen Victoria. After becoming the queen's goddaughter, Davies apparently spent the rest of her life between her home in England and Africa until her death in 1880.

Davies' life made me think of Potter even though Potter's memoir focuses primarily on her experiences of styling the hair of white Americans and Europeans. It made me wonder if she had in fact ever had the opportunity to style the hair of a person of African descent. Surely in her memoir, one case see the degree to which she emphasizes her desire to treat all people - black or white, rich or poor, enslaved or free - the same. 

"Love and Basketball" (2000)  has a funny reference to Spaudling's sporting goods empire.

Spaulding Collection, New York Public Library

In addition to learning about Potter, the students will also be introduced to various developments that help define city life including the arrival of department stores. They will learn as much via a text on nineteenth century urban culture in the United States. It was written by Gunther Barth. 

Baseball also helped define city life.  A.G. Spaulding, a native of Illinois, was one of the first Americans to make an enormous amount of money on sporting goods including equipment for baseball. 
By the 1880s, men who were confined to New York and Pittsburgh factories and offices, headed to ball parks. Whereas football was initially associated with the wealthy and educated, baseball early on made room for working class urban dwellers. But by the time it got professionalized in the late nineteenth century, the ball clubs - not the players - increasingly had the most power and this was true for decades.

This sport, like many, was segregated well into the twentieth century, oppressing certain players even more. As Barth tells us, not only needed something to divert their attention from their depressing environs, but something that mirrored their own struggle for success. Writes Barth, "the game almost reduced their daily tensions because its ups and downs seemed more momentous than their own lives."

miami: another postwar case study

I attended the UM when we won our 2nd  championship.

Mohl builds on Arnold Hirsch's study.

I am looking forward to next week's class and not because it is the last class of the semester. I will really miss the students, some of whom are graduating seniors. I am also looking forward to talking to them about black urban culture as it relates to Miami, my hometown. As mentioned earlier on this blog, my next research project involves an exploration of race and space in Miami across time.  At some point along the way, I will be attentive to the impact of the University of Miami's football program on race relations in South Florida. Whenever I say as much, many people mention ESPN's 30 for 30 documentary on the University of Miami, which certainly addresses this issue in passing. 

Miami in 1919, Perry Castaneda Collection, UT-Austin

The students will not only see this outstanding documentary next week, but will also read an excerpt from University of Alabama at Birmingham's Raymond Mohl and Mark Rose's study on interstate highway politics in South Florida. They will also read a Mohl essay on how Arnold Hirsch's second ghetto thesis relates to postwar housing patterns in Miami (Teresa Van Dyke, a librarian in Special Collections at Florida Atlantic University and one of Mohl's MA students, has also used Miami as a site to explore the second ghetto thesis).

As also earlier mentioned, my family's own migratory patterns in Miami-Dade County certainly demonstrate the belief by Mohl and others that the movement and relocation of African Americans from segregated housing, or "ghettoes," to other areas that eventually became segregated, or "second ghettoes," was a result of many factors including racial hostility via public policy and realtor practice. 

What new things can we learn about the postwar housing experiences of African Americans in urban areas? How can our new understandings of the ways in which "blackness" is understood differently in a county like Miami where people often come from Latin and Caribbean communities push our thinking on this issue? 

The map pictured here depicts Miami before the Second World War, shortly after some of my paternal ancestors relocated to Miami from the Bahamas. Other ancestors would arrive from Georgia and after the war, from Mississippi. 

Just seeing the words "Atlantic Ocean" on the map makes me long for the smell of salt in the air. My family originally lived in the Coconut Grove section of Miami before relocating to then-Carol City, which is in the "second ghetto" about which Mohl writes (neither are pictured on the map). To us, it was wonderful step up as this neighborhood was mostly middle class and filled with three and four bedroom houses. Carol City is now in the City of Miami Gardens. You can always tell how long someone has lived in South Florida. If they call Miami-Dade simply "Dade County" or Carol City simply "Carol City," they have been there for a while.

"to them we are more cookie cut than Pillsbury"

Adiche was born in Nigeria.

Yesterday we completed our spoken word presentations. Excerpts from the students' reading are posted in the YouTube clip above. While recording, I accidentally covered up the mic so I had to do a voice-over while editing. 

Cole recasted Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City." Iesha recasted Will Smith's "Welcome to Miami." And Dachelle recasted B.B. King's "Sweet Sixteen Blues." Dachelle's presentation was a timely performance because we just finished the second third of B.B. King's memoir. Indeed, we had a lively discussion after I encouraged the students to try and insert King, a Second World War vet and musician, into the postwar narrative that Thomas Sugrue describes in his study on the origins of the urban crisis in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities. While some students believed King's biography was a coded appeal to the mainstream, others did not totally buy it. Few can argue that his initial move from his home in the Mississippi Delta to nearby Memphis does figure into the ways in which many southern blacks left rural communities for cities even though his experiences did not entirely parallel to African Americans who were harmed by a deindustralizing postwar America. As Sugrue writes, when whites, jobs and businesses left urban spaces between the 1950s and 1960s,  capitalism posed special burdens for many people of color who were left behind.

King's thoughts about life in America proved interesting. For example, he says he does not believe fellow Mississippian Elvis Presley stole anything from African American musicians. Notably, King also performed at benefits for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.


Next week, we will finish B.B. King's autobiography while also turning to the different ways that "blackness" has been understood in the United States and other places across time. To get this conversation going, we will read an excerpt from Aline Helg's study on black Colombians, watch an excerpt from Melvin Van Peeble's 1968 "A Story of Three Day Pass," view an excerpt from the 1959 film "Black Orpheus" and read an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's well-received Americanah.

"i am somebody ... in detroit"

Diana Ross and the Supremes were a Detroit-based group.

This past Wednesday, Robyn, Brandy and Alex presented their spoken word adaptations of popular songs invoking images of people of color in urban spaces. Robyn recasted Gladys Knight and the Pips' "Mr. Welfare," a song from the 1974 movie Claudine; Brandy recasted Diana Ross and the Supremes' 1967 hit "Love Child" and Alex recasted Stevie Wonder's 1974 hit "Living for the City" (though I had to read his words as he'd lost his voice).

What these songs have in common: they allow us to see some of the trials of black life after the Second World War. This is an issue we will closely study  next week after reading an excerpt from Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Sugrue essentially argues that the period from the 1940s through the 1960s sets the stage for the many-layered racial crises all-too apparent in today's cities. In saying this, he is pointing to a particular window in which we see how capitalism produces inequality and how African Americans disproportionately figure into such inequality. As Sugrue has written, the joblessness, desolate landscape, and racist housing patterns in Detroit since the war can be found in other Rust Belt cities, or urban spaces from the northeast to the Midwest that were once the industrial "backbone" of this country.

 While reading Sugrue, we will consider some of the candid words offered in the 1973 documentary Wattstax, which we watched this past Wednesday. I was pleased to see the students' response to this historical music festival in the Watts section of Los Angeles. This so-called "black Woodstock" opened the door for us to learn more about why Watts went up in flames in 1965. I was particularly intrigued by how this one movie creates opportunities for conversations about black on black crime, black love, and black pride.

Hip hop performer/actor Ice Cube has sampled B.B. King's music.

On Wednesday, we also discussed the first third of B.B. King's memoir, which provided a chance for us to see how King, an African American man from a rural area, pushes our thinking about black life before the postwar era. King was born in poverty in the Mississippi Delta in the early 20th century. He would eventually relocate to Memphis where he slowly made a name for himself as a dee jay and a musician (By the way, the Wattstax festival was organized by the Memphis-based Stax Records whose roster included the Staple Singers and Isaac Hayes). Though he would go on to make considerable money as a blues musician, King was not unacquainted with racism. While serving a term in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, he saw how German prisoners of war were given better treatment than black American soldiers by white Americans.  King was still able to see that "not all whites" were behind the lynchings of which he was aware in the South. 

That said, speaking of King, Wattstax and Cube, we will also want to remember that black migration during the 20th century was not only to the north, but to the Far West where African Americans did not experience the full promise of postwar wealth - especially in the defense industry. This reality sits uneasily against that portrayed on the late-1960s/early-1970s television series Julia, which finds Diahann Carroll (who starred in Claudine) playing a single widowed mother who works as a nurse in the California aerospace industry.  The show has  across time had a mixed response for a variety of reasons including the belief by some that the show's producers attempted to erase race from Julia's experiences.

Diahann Carroll also stars in the 1974 film Claudine.

As we move on to the second third of King's book, it is worth it for us to think about this as we consider the "underclass" thesis we earlier discussed. Another challenge before us: revisiting our interest in how the postwar growth and movement of the black upper and middle class seems to have resulted in a black  underclass. Can we observe King's life against the picture that Sugrue offers? Is King part of this postwar urban crisis narrative that Sugrue describes? How does he circumvent or find himself in this story of racial urban oppression? Certainly his music resonates with many artists who have focused on black urban life, among them Ice Cube who sampled King's  "Chains and Things" for his rap song "Bird in Hand." I hope my mention of Cube's sample on Wednesday helped the students reflect more on our earlier attention to Robin Kelley's Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class. King said he turned to his guitar to cope with pain. Some hip hop performers appear to have done something similar.

That said, how does the narrative of  postwar urban life change (or stay the same) with the specific experiences of black women front and center as seen in Julia, scenes from Wattstax, and various songs and readings in mind -  high among the latter, the Daniel Monynihan 1965 report on the black family via the excerpt from the Joe Trotter, Earl Lewis and Tera Hunter edited collection?